Surgery Grand Rounds, Drug Metabolism Seminar, and PBL

Today was a really good day. In the morning before class, I went to the Surgery Grand Rounds talk, which was about the future of surgical publishing. The speaker was the editor of a surgery journal, which I believe was fittingly called "Surgery." It was a very good talk. One thing that the speaker spent some time discussing was about how the types of surgery experiments that are published in his journal now are very different versus the kinds of experiments that his journal used to publish. In particular, he said that there are not as many basic science articles being published in surgery journals any more. But it's not that people are publishing fewer surgery experiments. Now there are just more outcomes research and other clinical types of experiments being published. Also, he talked a lot about web-based open access journals. On the good side, they're free for everyone, but on the downside, they're often either unrefereed, or there isn't any way to pay for them since there are no ads. (There are a couple of current refereed open access journals, but they are funded by philanthropy.)

Our seminar was fantastic. It was by the same person who did our last pharm seminar. I wish the course directors would get this pharmacist to lead all of our pharm seminars and not just the GI ones. We went over the cytochromes P450 and other aspects of drug metabolism. What makes her seminars so good is that she has us go over cases in small groups, and then we talk about them as a class. She also gives us a summary table of the most important info we need to learn at the end of the seminar. The material we covered was a really good segue into my PBL presentation since I had the pharm learning objective.

By now, our PBL patient is not doing very well any more. Well, we knew he was going to go downhill, so this isn't really a surprise. We had more time to discuss the social/economic/psychological aspects of the case, and we'll be doing more of that on Friday. I'm not totally thrilled that the course directors keep sneaking SLEEP issues into our PBL cases, but this case really has a ton of them because of the whole liver transplant issue. ("SLEEP" stands for Social, Legal, Economic, Environmental, and Psychological. It's part of the acronym "VINDICATE SLEEP" that we use sometimes when we're working through the case and coming up with hypotheses. Apparently we aren't the only ones who use it.)

Only two more days until spring break!